Treatment Programs for Family Violence

Abstract

Similar issues and similar interventions appear in treatment programs for child physical abuse, child sexual abuse, and woman abuse. Programs in all three of these areas make use of crisis lines, temporary shelter for victims, and professionally guided self-help groups. A wide variety of treatment orientations are used. However, common to all areas is a controversy over whether to use a family systems approach or an individual approach. Critics of family approaches claim that too much value is placed on family reunion or that they implicitly blame the victim. There is also a common trend toward closer collaboration with the criminal justice system. The collaboration is sometimes meant to convey the message to the family and society that family violence is a crime but more often it is designed to keep the offender in treatment. Cognitive and behavioral approaches have been evaluated more often than other approaches and seem to show promising results. Unfortunately, serious defects in the designs of nearly all evaluation studies conducted to date make it impossible to draw definite conclusions about treatment effectiveness.